A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (15 page)

One of the Irish maids had told her that it felt like a sort of sausage, and sort of like the precooked neck of a turkey—well, she hadn’t said so directly to Charlotte, but Charlotte was always eavesdropping on the maids. That was the only time she’d ever heard anyone say anything about it. She wanted to know what it felt like soft, and what it felt like hard. Arthur’s was hard, but it would be soft later on; she didn’t mind waiting, although she would have preferred soft first.

“Charlotte, have you ever touched a man before?”

She shook her head. She said, “Why did you ask me, in what way?”

“You could have meant your lips.”

“My
lips
?”

“And your mouth.”

“My
mouth
?”

“And I you.”

Incredible! It was just like the night she’d arrived, when the wall in the front hall gave way, and then the floor, and everything went dark and she didn’t know what was happening. But now nothing was going all dark. Somewhere in the sky the sun was starting to rise. Gray light was creeping in. It was a wonderful, beautiful dawn, in spite of being wintry-shadowy.

She knew exactly what was happening to her. She had never seen a sunrise look so good.

T
he water was running in the pipes again and Charlotte didn’t care that it was only coming in trickles. She was going to wash her hair.

The big washroom had a brand-new coal stove and it was thrumming with heat. An iron kettle on top of it was heating extra water; two large pots of water were already on the floor beside the stove, sitting nicely at a lukewarm temperature for her rinsing.

The walls and window were steamy, glistening. The plug was in the drain and the tub contained a luxury height of warmed water, waiting for her. The rug on the floor was an oval of fleecy sheepskin. Charlotte had nothing on except the white cotton shirt Arthur Pym had been wearing, long ago last evening. It covered her to her thighs.

On a little white table were a bottle of Pears’ Hair Soap, a box of talcum powder, some fluffy white powder puffs, a set of combs in different sizes, and four jars in four shades of pink, filled with lotions. The little maid had left to get some towels.

Out in the streets things were moving again—slowly, but things were moving. The storm had dumped some fourteen, fifteen inches of snow. Charlotte didn’t care about the outside world, as she hadn’t done when she was sick. But this was different.

Suddenly the door opened and revealed a dark-haired woman of fifty or so, in a pretty paisley dressing gown and purple slippers. Her hair was thick and there was a lot of it, but it wasn’t pinned up. She’d bunched it up with one hand and was holding it in a mound at the top of her head, as if it were a hat, and a fierce wind were blowing; loose strands were streaming out through her fingers. She must have been as eager to clean her hair as Charlotte was.

She had an appealing, horsey face, and spoke at a brisk clip. “Hello,” she said brightly, as if they’d come upon each other in someone’s sitting room. She did not react in any way to what Charlotte was wearing. Wasn’t it interesting how quickly something so extraordinary became normal? “I see you’ve got in here before me. I’ll come back! Are you the new woman who’s the wife of the senator?”

“No, I’m the new woman who…well, I’m just new,” said Charlotte.

“Heavy stuff,” said the woman, indicating her hair and furrowing her brow to indicate a headache. “I may have overdone it on the bourbon last night, but it was marvelous all the same, from a lady from Kentucky—have you met her, a photographer, going all over, on her own, to take pictures of cities in their very worst aspects? She’s very good at it.”

“I met Miss Singleton,” said Charlotte.

“Ah. Did you look at her pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Alcorn?”

“I looked at her ice garden.”

“Haven’t seen that. She invite you up there?”

“She wanted some sweets I had. But they were thrown in the fire instead. Is it true she can’t have sugar?”

“It’s her blood. Can’t abide the least bit. Last time she got hold of a confection she went into a shock and, for days, couldn’t even use the one good hand she’s got. Are you the woman who came in last Sunday from Rhode Island, the one who’s got a hat shop?”

“No.”

“Are you the doctor’s niece who’s not supposed to be here?”

Charlotte sighed and nodded meekly.

“Had your lunch?” said the woman.

“Is it afternoon?”

The woman smiled at her broadly, showing all her teeth, nice teeth, very white, very square. “Like that, is it? Lovely when one doesn’t know. I’m in the same boat myself. I should have left two days ago and I suppose at home they’re thinking me suffering deprivations, but I have to tell you, I’ve no complaints of this snow.”

“Neither do I.”

“P’rhaps I’ll see you downstairs later on, and mind you don’t use up all the coal.”

“See you!” said Charlotte.

“And mind you don’t use up the Pears’.”

“I won’t!”

The door was shut. Charlotte slipped off the shirt, let it fall to the floor, then picked it up, bundled it, and held it up to her face. It smelled like Arthur. She folded it and placed it on the table and stepped into the tub. A cake of soap was in the water already, making frothy bubbles, smelling like lilacs.

What was that song the Irish maids used to sing? About the rover in the clover?

Oh, I’ll meet you in the clover, you rover,

The clover is where I will be,

Over in the clover, the sweet summer clover,

My rover, you’ll come soon to me.

She didn’t remember the other words, but it was a wonderful, buoyant tune and she hummed it. She pictured the summer place by the cliffs, in the heat of August, with the glare of yellow sunlight all around, so strong it made you feel like you’d been drinking too much wine. She pictured the big main house and the little cottages, and in one of the doorways, his eyes squinting up in the light, stood Arthur Pym, she imagined, waving to her, and wearing a bathing costume; he’d just been swimming; his hair was slicked back; his head was as smooth as a seal’s.

She pictured fishing boats in the harbor, one of which came in close to the rocks. In real life there was an old iron mooring ring lodged fast in the stone, for boats that needed to come and go surreptitiously: it used to be a colonial smuggler’s cove, and probably, when Heaths weren’t there to oversee it, it still was.

There were no Heaths in the picture. Charlotte saw the captain of the boat waving for her to come aboard with Arthur, and they did; they went right down the cliffs as if the rocks were a staircase. Arthur told the captain, “I’ll take care of it from here,” and the captain jumped over the side and swam away, and off went Charlotte and Arthur. The boat would be a dory and they’d each take an oar. “Charlotte, you can row, how clever of you.” She’d prove herself as strong as he was, maybe stronger. In real life she’d once paddled a tiny sailing dinghy with another girl from Miss Georgeson’s, on a picnic excursion at a tiny lake in the Valley: there had not been wind to bring them back; the boat had turned over; they would have drowned if the water wasn’t only as high as their knees, and she’d never done anything like it again. “We’ll row to a foreign country, eventually,” Arthur would tell her.

Everything she did, he approved of it. Up would rise the horizon like a prize she could reach out and touch.

She had a small pewter pitcher. She scooped tub water into it and poured it over her hair. She could feel the tangles relaxing; she felt as relieved as if she hadn’t soaked her head for a year. “Over in the clover, over in the clover, the sweet summer clover, my rover, my rover,” she sang. She didn’t know any boat songs.

The door opened, and once again, it wasn’t little Eunice. Arthur Pym himself walked in, with two big, clean towels and a terribly worried expression. Here he was!

She instantly sank down into the water, embarrassed, like she had something to hide. She didn’t mind her nakedness half as much as the fact that she didn’t want him to know she’d been lolling around in the water daydreaming of him. But then she thought, if there was ever a man who had the right to enter a lady’s bathing room, it was him, and the lady was her.

She wondered what she looked like to him with wet hair. She would have enjoyed having him tell her what the wet-dark redness of it was like, as if he’d make up a little poem about it, spontaneously. Maybe he’d get into the tub with her. Was that allowed?

“Arthur,” she said, “I thought you were leaving for your journey to go and cut up that poor bog man’s body.”

“You have my shirt.”

“I’d think you’d have another, somewhere.”

“I don’t.”

“If you want it back, you’ll have to wait until I’m finished here, as I’ve not brought anything else to put on for going back to my room.”

He was fully dressed except for his shirt. His green jacket looked sweet, with just his undershirt below it. But he just looked down at Charlotte and shrugged, grimly. “I reached my tutor by the telephone. The dissection’s been postponed for at least another two days. There’s too much for them to do in the hospital. And the roads out there are still blocked, anyway, as they’d got far more snow than we did.”

Her heart felt cold as she finally realized the gravity of his expression. He came over to the side of the tub. “Charlotte, I’ve come to tell you there’s a woman downstairs by the name of Mabel Gerson. She says she’s your friend, and she must speak to you at once. Harry has her in the public tearoom, which, by the by, is still closed, but he can’t get anything out of her.”

She wasn’t new at knowing her way around coping with something someone said to her that she didn’t want to hear. “I am going to wash my hair now, Arthur, and if you’d like to bring over the kettle, please do. The maid has abandoned me.”

“It’s urgent.”

“I don’t know anyone named Mabel.”

“Charlotte, you do. She’s from the bakery that delivered you here.” He’d started sweating as soon as he entered; beads of sweat were all over his forehead. In another few minutes his hair would be damp, and if he pushed it back, he really would look sleek, like a seal. Daydreams can come true!

“The kettle, please,” said Charlotte.

“I think it would best for you to see this woman at once. You’ll need to know what she has to say.”

“I think, Arthur, I’ll wash my hair.”

“Well, be quick about it.”

“It’s so warm, take off your jacket.”

“Not a wise idea, at the moment,” he said. He touched the kettle before bringing it over and first splashed some water onto his own hand to check the degree. He reminded Charlotte of stories about kings who had food tasters, who would suffer and die of whatever was meant to kill the king. He leaned down and poured water on her hair very slowly, although she’d expected it to all come out in a rush, as he was supposed to be making her hurry. He reached for the hair soap and was just about to hand it to her when Mrs. Petty came in.

“Why didn’t you lock the door?” cried Charlotte. Even with her eyes partly blinded by water, she knew who it was.

In Mrs. Petty’s hands were Charlotte’s dress, underwear, stockings, shoes, vest, and jacket, and the hairbrush that was actually Mabel’s, and the small heavy-cloth purse in which Charlotte kept her money, which had been lying anyway in plain sight on her bureau.

“We have to get her out of here,” Mrs. Petty said to Arthur, like they were a two-person conspiracy.

“Is that woman determined to come upstairs looking for her?”

“Harry wouldn’t let that happen, but it’s worse. Lily’s coming to take a nap, in
her
room. She was all night at the wards with the men from that fish place where the roof fell in, and she had three births where there was no one else to attend—they’re always putting her on the births—and she was running around like a chicken, as if I didn’t know what that’s like. She is going to have a fit if she gets here and finds out
who’s still here
. She cannot be allowed to do that. And I know what that woman downstairs wants to say because I gave her a cream cake and she never had anything like it, and her husband has the bakery. She wants to say”—and here Mrs. Petty raised her voice, extremely stridently—“Charlotte, your husband knows how you got to town
long ago
the other night, because you left your horses with the bakers and one got away and went home, to your window, and then it left to go back and get the other one and your husband followed it. Your baker friends swore to God Almighty you were only driven to the trolley and God is with you on that because no one stopped to remember it wasn’t running, and I am up to my throat in deliveries coming in, my kitchen is acting like a lunatic, I have got to go down to the cooking school for a consultation with Miss Farmer, who does not take tardiness kindly, and the children are going to be expelled from their school, I think, and the baby’s with that maid Georgina who has sniffles and she is going to catch them, and I could
spit.
”

“Expelled for what reason?” said Arthur.

“What do you mean, what reason? They don’t need a reason,” said Mrs. Petty. “My girl told another girl that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, because he wouldn’t be strong enough to push out of the tomb, as he’d been tortured and nailed, and, to begin with, he was never any Hercules. That’s a reason.”

“I thought the tomb got opened by an angel,” said Arthur.

“That’s the same thing the girl my girl spoke to said. My girl says angels are only bigger fairies and they haven’t got muscles.”

“Terence has a lady friend who’s got a little academy, near Charlestown. You should speak to him.”

“Is the lady one of those Christians?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, I wouldn’t know, but the way Terence met her was here.”

“That might be a good idea,” said Mrs. Petty. “Do you think she’d take them in as boarders, the girl and the boy?”

“You could ask.”

“Good. Every time I tell them I am going to give them away, they start acting like they’re not in training to be criminals.”

Would they ever stop talking? Why were they talking? The water was getting less warm. Arthur said, “I wonder if anyone followed that woman here.”

Mrs. Petty grinned when she got to this part; she seemed to admire Mabel Gerson. They hadn’t known each other personally back in the town, but obviously, they did now. “Mrs. Gerson came in at dawn with a milk truck and went to some shops. They’re all open again. She’s got packages. And she stopped in the tearoom on Charles Street, and came in the back way. They think at home Charlotte’s at Lily’s and God is with her on that, too.”